The street pattern is still legible in the fields near the old parish church, and at least five burgage plots, the long narrow strips of land allocated to tenants in a medieval planned town, run roughly east to west from what was once the village centre. It is the kind of place that registers only as a slight irregularity in a field until you know what you are looking at.

By 1640, when the Civil Survey recorded it a decade or so before its compilation in 1654 to 1656, Ballyclerahan was a functioning manorial settlement under the ownership of Paul Boyton, described in the survey as a gentleman and an Irish Papist. On his lands stood a small castle and a number of cabins, and the town held a fair once a year, on the 28th of September. A population estimate drawn from 1659 figures suggests around 325 people living there at that time, which is a substantial number for a rural settlement. The Boyton family had been its patrons, and it carried the full apparatus of a manorial village: estate centre, parish focus, and the economic activity that an annual fair implies. What caused the settlement to empty out is not clearly recorded; a gap in the hearth money evidence after 1667 leaves the later seventeenth century frustratingly obscure. At some point, the centre of gravity shifted eastward to the present village, and the old core was abandoned.

The earthworks north of the church survive in good condition, though those in the field to the northeast were levelled around 1980, a reminder that these traces are less permanent than they appear. The associated castle and church remains are also recorded nearby, and together they give a reasonable impression of where the medieval settlement sat in the landscape.